Impact of Building Orientation on Annual Energy Consumption in Schools in Hot Arid Regions in Iran, Using Climate Modeling, Case Study: A Double-class School

School buildings constitute a large part of the public buildings and thereby being the most important consumers of energy in Iran. Considering the current construction conditions, reforming construction and design methods seems to provide a lot of potential for energy efficiency. Considering a large number of schools in Iran, it is of special importance to carefully study such methods, one of which is to modify building geometry factors, including building orientation. In this study, a double-class school with a simple plan, as a typical building pattern in hot arid regions of Iran, is considered as a case study to accurately determine its optimal orientation for six cities of Isfahan, Shiraz, Zahedan, Qom, Kerman, and Yazd, as cities with over 500,000 people in the hot arid regions of Iran, using computer simulation. To this end, for each city, 72 models are simulated in different directions with a 5-degree variance, and a 10-degree range of the minimum annual energy consumption is obtained. Next, the simulation with a 1-degree variance is performed in the same range, and the results obtained for the six cities are compared. Finally, for this building type, the greatest and smallest impact of the building orientation on energy consumption is observed in Qom city and Yazd city, respectively. Also, despite the low percentage of annual energy savings, due to a large number of typical buildings in all six cities and their useful life span of 50 years, it is necessary to carefully choose the direction for the long period. Because the small amount of fuel storage during the annual consumption of a building will become a significant number at the national level during the entire period of operation.